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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-23T17:12:27+00:00

I’m a .NET developer with some questions about a small Mac project coming up.

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I’m a .NET developer with some questions about a small Mac project coming up.

We are going to be creating a small program for Mac OSX. The software will need to have a simple UI (1 screen) and will need to consume a WCF web service.

  • Should we code on our Windows boxes or on Mac machines? We have a couple Mac Minis, but we mostly do Windows development.

  • What IDE/dev environment should we use? (Eclipse, Xcode, etc.)

  • How does Mac software deployment generally work?

…

  • No one has mentioned Java/Eclipse. Isn’t that an option?
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  1. Editorial Team

    Here are two options:

    1. Write in Objective-C, using Xcode on Macs
    2. Write in C#, using Mono on Windows or on a Mac with SharpDevelop

    The advantage of #1 is the resulting app will be much easier to deploy to others, but you might have trouble consuming the WCF service. It depends on what exact interface you are exposing and what the types of the parameters are.

    The advantage of #2 is that you can use your C# skills. I don’t know the state of WCF in Mono, and the GUI may not look native.

    If you go with #1, the main issue will be using Objective-C. Since you are targeting the Mac, make sure you enable the Garbage Collector, or else you will have to also learn memory-management. If you use Xcode 4, it’s similar in spirit to Visual Studio, although the details are different. For a simple project, following the tutorials will probably be enough — I suspect the hard part will be interacting with WCF. To make your life easier, make the interface to the service extremely simple (simple parameter types and returns).

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